KALAMAZOO – So often, when the level of violence reaches a tipping point in a city or neighborhood, there are three well-worn responses – an increased police presence, prosecution and sentencing reforms or talk of how better access to education, health care and employment, among other things, is the cure.

Kennedy, a Michigan native who now heads the Center for Crime Prevention & Control at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, says reviving a crime-plagued neighborhood requires confronting the violence – not its root causes -- head-on.

That’s what he’s done for the last 15 years with Operation Ceasefire, a violence-reduction initiative credited with what is known as the “Boston Miracle” in 1996 and huge reductions in crime in cities such as Minneapolis and High Point, N.C.

“What the record shows is that when this is done well, you can reduce homicides across a city at a level that is as high as 50 percent and in neighborhoods where this is concentrated … you can have a genuinely dramatic impact,” Kennedy said.

That’s the message Kennedy says he will bring next Saturday when he speaks at a banquet for Kalamazoo’s Interfaith Strategy for Advocacy & Action in the Community.

The event is scheduled for 5:30 p.m. at Western Michigan University’s Bernhard Center.

Critical time

Kennedy’s visit comes at what ISAAC President Douglas King said is a critical time for Kalamazoo.

Two young black men, ages 21 and 22, have been gunned down in the city since January. The fatal shootings happened just blocks apart on North Rose Street, a main thoroughfare on the city’s north side.

The two killings marked the ninth and 11th time that someone has been killed in the north side neighborhood since June 2010.

Kennedy said his program was birthed and refined through his work in cities where the homicide rate for young black males ran as high as 500 to 600 per 100,000, drastically higher than the national homicide rate of 4 per 100,000.

“It’s astronomical,” Kennedy said. “These are communities that are suffering in extreme ways, both from violent crime and the unintended damage caused by criminal justice … What these communities really need is less crime and less jail and less prison.”

Kennedy said his work has shown that in the most dangerous communities and neighborhoods, crime and violence are driven by only 5 percent of “easily identifiable people.” For example, he said that his work in Cincinnati to corral crime and violence there identified 60 groups totaling 1,500 people – less than 0.5 percent of the city’s population – that were associated with 75 percent of its homicides.

“Then about 85 to 90 percent of the 5 percent are not genuinely dangerous so it ends up being a tiny number of people who drive all of this,” Kennedy said.

View full sizeGazette fileEric Coleman, 22, was shot and killed outside a house in the 1300 block of North Rose Street.

Reaching the catalysts

Within that statement is where Kennedy’s program gets its starting point of identifying the small number of people who are the catalysts for violence within a city or single neighborhood.

From there comes a key moment, what Kennedy refers to as the “call in” where the individuals are summoned to a meeting with Kennedy, their own family members, crime victims, city residents, social services representatives, prosecutors and police.

“They find this partnership, they see people from their community for whom they have respect, mothers of murdered children, maybe their own grandmother, old gang members, people from the faith community, and they see people who can help them,” Kennedy said.

The meeting leaves those called there with three basic messages, Kennedy said.

From the community, they are told they have to stop what they are doing for the sake of their neighborhood and city. Social service agencies offer them assistance with education, employment and housing, among other things.

They hear and see the heartbreak from crime victims and they are given an ultimatum by police and prosecutors to stop what they are doing for good or face the wrath of a legal system that “will make it their business to shut those groups down.”

Kennedy recalled one call-in that included “40 of the most dangerous people in a large city” who heard from the mother who lost her son to gunfire.

The woman’s story left the group “with tears streaming down their faces,” Kennedy said.

“It’s extremely powerful,” he said. “… That flies in the face of what we think about men like this. We think that they are sociopathic, we think that they are unreachable, we think that they are crazy a lot of time.

“… One of the things that makes this approach work is that behind their bluster and bravado … a lot of these guys hate what’s going on.”

'Not like any other approach'

Kennedy’s programs – which include versions to reduce violence and drug activity – got their start in 1996 in Boston when his efforts there led to a dramatic reduction in youth violence.

The programs are in place now in more than 70 cities across the U.S., including Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and Newark, N.J. It’s also in use in Glasgow, Scotland and in a number of cities across Great Britain in the wake of recent riots.

“This is not like, to be perfectly honest, any other approach to dealing with these issues in that there is a well-developed pathway to getting these good results,” Kennedy said.

Other approaches, Kennedy said, often prove to be very much unsuccessful.

There’s the mindset of increasing police presence or reforming criminal prosecutions and toughening sentencing guidelines. Or discussion of the desire for “changing the economic climate” in a neighborhood.

“The things people decided to try were fantastically difficult and complex,” Kennedy said. “If we’re saying we’ve got a cluster of killings here and we need to do something about people getting killed then that core community uplift work is not likely to be a solution to that problem.

“ … (The program) is not a solution to all of the issues in these communities but it will dramatically improve public safety and it creates the conditions where that other work has the chance to succeed.”

Tickets for the ISAAC Banquet are $35 each or $30 each for a table of eight and must be reserved by Sunday. For tickets, call 269-341-4213 or go to www.isaackalamazoo.org.